Bob Parry isone of the unknown heroes of this business of mine. Almost alone, he stood against the Reagan era foreign policy at the height of Saint Ronnie's popularity, bringing the truth about the savagery that administration and its clients were bringing down on the people of Central America. He is still dogging the general scandal of Iran-Contra to this day and, since I think the non-prosecution of that episode, and the successful stonewalling by both Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was a decisive turning point in getting us to where we were when we launched the Iraq fiasco, I applaud him for that. He stayed true to his calling, never wrote a bad book about John Belushi, and didn't get scared even when he actually was threatened by White House operatives.

Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

There's no point in excerpting the piece. As the kidz say, read the whole thing. And know that most of this rancid mess got buried because official Washington didn't think the American people were strong enough to know what sorry moraltoads their leaders were. These documents are the final testimony that "looking forward and not backwards" is no way to run a democracy.